I have never felt as close to a writer or a fictional experience as I do to Nicola Yoon and The Sun Is Also a Star. It’s been said that having a wide variety of characters and cultures represented in literature is vital to our understanding of others and for others to understand us, and I’ve made that statement multiple times. What I never thought about before was how important it is to have a wide variety of characters and cultures represented in order to better understand ourselves. I understand myself and my family better because of The Sun is Also A Star.
The Sun Is Also a Star is a brilliant representation of humanity, and the roles love, fate, chance, and purpose play in how our world unfolds around us. Sun follows Natasha and David, two teenagers who are at points in their lives when their decisions have more weight, their futures uncertain, and their destinies seemingly in everyone else’s hands but their own. The story takes place over the course of a day, on the busy streets of New York City, and uses a unique narrative consisting of multiple POVs. Nicola Yoon converges lives and shows that even within our own story, the rest of the world matters.
Sun is about dreamers. It’s about the romantics and it’s about the realists. It’s about everyone who simply dreams of a life filled with happiness, passion, and love. It’s also about those who practically dream of security and freedom. Sun is about the immigrant story, one that’s more important than ever.
Sun follows Daniel, a Korean American boy who doesn’t fit into his family, and doesn’t fit into his country. It’s about Natasha, an undocumented Jamaican immigrant, who would appear more “American” than most Americans, because she certainly doesn’t “act Jamaican” but she’s not and she’s about to be deported. Sun is about our parents, who grew up with dreams as well, and we may or may not have played a part in those dreams. Sun is about the strangers around us, whose decisions can have unforeseeable, and long-lasting effects on our lives. It’s also about the strangers who are also affected by the decisions we make.
This is a story I think everyone should experience. It’s both global and intimate. It’s a love story, but also so much more. The characters in this book are layered and multifaceted. The story is thoughtful, profound, romantic, and hopeful. Yes, it’s a teenage love story—one that I fell hard and fast for—but it’s also about family and history. And of course, I was all in once I saw that it’s a reflection of my culture, and myself, and Nicola Yoon brightly showcases the beautiful complexity of my history, the complicated relationships intertwined, the dreams of my past and my future.
If you’ve read Everything, Everything, then you’ll recognize the exceptional style of Nicola Yoon’s prose. It’s gorgeous really, and even more so because she has this way of including seemingly random gems and factoids, and making the dry seem poetic. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve read her (read her!), but like Natasha, Nicola is a scientist and a romantic, and when those two combine, magic happens.
The Sun Is Also a Star is magic. It’s sweet, it’s meaningful, it’s heartbreaking, it’s buoyant, it sweeps you away, and yet keeps you grounded at the same time. This thought provoking love story is one I had a difficult time reviewing because I didn’t think I could truly convey what it meant to me. I reviewed it, but still haven’t expressed all I felt. I’ll just say that The Sun Is Also a Star shows how love provides hope and reason in a sometimes unfair and unreasonable world, and that message is everything to a romantic in a cynical world. I highly recommend.
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Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.Highlighted by 2,991 Kindle readers- Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.Highlighted by 2,148 Kindle readers
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The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
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I give this one huge shiny recommendation!
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2020
Actual rating 4.5 stars.‘The Sun Is Also a Star’ exceeded any expectations I had. When it was first released there was a lot of hype, and I tend to wait and read later without any influence to sway my opinion. But I had to get a move on with the release of the film adaptation.A contemporary narrated in alternating points of view between teens Natasha, a Jamaican native, grown up in New York about to be deported; and Daniel, a Korean-American with ‘tiger’ parents pushing him towards a Yale application and becoming a doctor, despite his passion for poetry. We also get the occasional factoid chapter around physics, science, or a side characters perspective/history/future.We see social issues of interracial relationships, racism (and typecasting), immigration (both legal and illegal), mixed in with identity, and coming of age all at that tender age where the world flips on its head – graduation of high school. It was a hot-bed of themes and issues to create a passionate contemporary.The pacing did not lag anywhere in this novel – which is high praise for contemporary. Usually they are introspective, symbolic, and take some time to build. ‘The Sun is Also a Star’ set the stakes high straight away and kept the pressure on until the end.We also get a pizza slice of the New York landscape. Coffee shops, record stores, the tourist strip, the corporate buildings – it was an almost magical depiction of the city as seen through the eyes of our protagonists.The family dynamics of both Daniel and Natasha are also a great peek into how POC are depicted, and how their culture shape their behaviour.I did find the ending typical of contemporaries, ending in that ‘what if’ moment, leaving the reader to make up their own mind as to what happens after the last page. But it does this with an unexpected flair and twist that I enjoyed.One theme that is strongly resonating throughout is that we are made up of the same molecules as the universe, proving that everything is connected. It pushes this further by playing with fate, predetermination, and how universal forces follow an order about things. I found it poetic. Sometimes it can be cliché, but ‘The Sun Is Also a Star’ managed to pull it off with sophistication.I’m wondering if they will be able to replicate that some tone with the screen adaptation, or if it will come off as cheesy.Took me a while to get around to read this one, but very glad I finally have and give this a huge shiny recommendation.
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2020
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Top reviews from other countries
Yasmin
So amazing that it brought tears to my eyes for literally no reason!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 8, 2018
Yasmin
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 8, 2018
It’s a beautiful read, consistently making me want to laugh and cry, and question my own opinions in regard to how the universe works.
Firstly, I’d like to mention that the cover art for this book is absolutely stunning. Upon finishing it, I understood its meaning immediately: that every second, different people, things and circumstances are all brought together, and they clash to create an outburst of consequences that have a huge impact on the rest of our lives. We make hundreds of decisions every single day, and each of these decisions leads to a different future where hundreds of more decisions lie. The outcome depends on which route we take. The cover and the novel, both encourage readers to think about everything they do with an open mind, and to be careful with how we effect other people’s journeys.
Leading on from that, I love how every event in the novel was interlinked with another, how every person we were introduced to either had a hand in how Daniel and Natasha’s lives played out, or vice-versa. It shows how even saying one kind (or rude) word to a stranger can influence them to make a huge life-changing decision.
The novel also dealt well with racism and how young people cope with having extremely prejudice parents. Daniel’s father’s disrespect towards Natasha and his embarrassment, I felt was written incredibly well and worked towards giving the characters more dimension. It’s realistic to write, not only about two characters who are both considered minorities in Twenty-First Century America, but who also don’t conform to the stereotypes placed on them. Daniel’s issues with his Korean parents wanting what’s best for him instead of what makes him happiest, and Natasha’s father wanting what’s best for himself instead of what’s best for his family, gives them common ground which many readers will be able to identify with. Yoon portrays realistic family dynamics in showing that they are complicated and hardly ever perfect.
Although I loved The Sun Is Also a Star, the reason I’m not giving it five stars, is that it was a little hard to get into. I think this was because the chapters started off very short and kept switching perspectives, however I understand that this was necessary to get the whole concept across. More into the middle I began to enjoy the short chapters because they gave us access to what each character was thinking in any particular moment. Something else that bothered me, was Natasha’s personality. As brutal as that sounds, she was a bit hard to like because of her pessimistic nature and how rude she was to Daniel at times, but as the story went on and he warmed her heart, she was much easier to read.
The ending was absolutely amazing – so amazing that it brought tears to my eyes for literally no reason! I wholeheartedly recommend this book as it really can change your entire viewpoint on the world and our day-to-day lives. 4 stars to Nicola Yoon’s, The Sun Is Also a Star. Brilliant.
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Kristel Greer
Beautifully written with incredible characters. I highly recommend it.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 8, 2022
Kristel Greer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 8, 2022
Daniel has always been the responsible one. The second son of a Korean family who loves him but has made him live in the shadow of his more successful older brother. He worked hard and strove to make his parents proud. When his brother Charlie messes up his previously impressive life by getting kicked out of college, their parents shift their focus onto him. They expect great things including him getting early acceptance at Yale and studying to be a doctor. Neither idea appeals to Daniel as he would rather write poetry about life and love. On his way to his college interview, he meets Natasha and he is determined to prove to her that love truly exists no matter what it takes.
With time running out for them to have the future that they dream of, will the universe interfere and send them down a different path together or are they fated to keep the hand they were dealt while being separated in the process?
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 I loved the setup for this story. Daniel and Natasha are complete opposites but somehow the fact that their lives are shaped both by their families and societal circumstance gives them a common bond. Daniel's sweetness softens Natasha's hard outlook on life while Natasha's pragmatic and strongminded spirit inspires Daniel to stand up for himself. They complement and empower each other as they fall in love. It was a complicated and emotional story that kept me gripped until the very last line. Beautifully written with incredible characters. I highly recommend it.
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Miss K. Southern
Such a clever layout and important message, but some will hate the gushy insta-love...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 27, 2018Mrs. Lj Hart
A brilliant beautiful story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 10, 2021
